Chapter 172: The Comparative Study

Chapter 172: Chapter 172: The Comparative Study

Yui told him her decision at 7:03 on Sunday evening, three minutes late. It was the first time in eight months she had ever not answered on the first ring.

He had been sitting on the crate in front of his desk since 6:40 with the phone in his hand, watching the minutes change. At 7:00 exactly, he called. It rang four times, and then five. For one long, cold moment, he thought something had happened.

On the sixth ring, she answered, out of breath.

"Sorry," she said. "Sorry. I was running up the stairs. There’s a lift, but it’s always broken." She laughed breathlessly. "Every building in Finland has a lift that’s always broken. I think it’s a national tradition."

"Where were you?"

"At the university. In my supervisor’s office." She was still catching her breath. "I went in at eleven this morning to give her my answer. She kept me for two hours. Then she made me coffee and kept me for another hour." A pause. "Then I ran."

He sat very still on the crate.

"I said yes," Yui said.

He closed his eyes.

"To the doctorate," she went on, before he could say anything. "Three years. Funded." Another pause. "But not the one she offered."

He opened his eyes again.

She explained it the way she explained things at the tutoring centre, one step at a time, patiently, making sure he followed before going on.

The doctorate her supervisor had offered was a study of Finnish reading methods, three years in Helsinki. It was a good project, and important. But it was the kind of study that stayed in one country and one system, looking at one way of doing things very carefully.

"And I realized, on Friday night, that it wasn’t mine," Yui said. "It was hers. Hers is the Finnish study. She’s been building it for eleven years. It’s beautiful." She took a breath. "Mine’s different."

"What’s yours?"

"Kenji," Yui said simply.

He didn’t say anything. He was holding the phone very tightly.

"A boy in Asagaya who hated books," Yui said, "learned to read because someone let him draw sea serpents in the margins and then asked him what the sea serpent wanted. Here, a boy in a school on the edge of Helsinki draws monsters in his reading book. His teacher asks him what the monster wants and sends him to the next page to find out." She paused. "It’s the same method. In two countries, eight thousand kilometres apart. Nobody’s ever studied them side by side. Nobody’s ever asked why the same thing works on a boy in Tokyo and a boy in Finland, when everything else about their schools is different."

He heard her breathe out, eight thousand kilometres away.

"So I wrote a proposal," she said. "On Friday night, until four in the morning. A comparative study of two countries and two classrooms. There’d be two years in Helsinki, and one year of fieldwork in Tokyo, split across three winters. Three months every January to March, at the tutoring centre in Asagaya and two primary schools in Suginami, watching Japanese teachers do what the Finnish ones do. Then taking what I learn back to Finland."

"Your supervisor—"

"Read it this morning," Yui said. "In front of me. She read it three times. It took forty minutes. Then she took off her glasses and said it was a better project than the one she’d offered me." Yui’s voice cracked, very slightly. "She said she’d been waiting eleven years for a student who wanted to do something she hadn’t thought of first."

He couldn’t say anything.

"I need you to know something," Yui said. "Number four on your list. What I need." She was quiet for a moment. "I didn’t design it around you. The Tokyo fieldwork isn’t there so I can come home. It’s there because Kenji is in Tokyo, and the method started there, and the study needs him. It would need him even if you lived in Osaka." A pause. "But I won’t pretend I didn’t notice that every January to March, for three years, I’ll be one wall away from the stairwell."

"Both," Haruki said. His voice wasn’t steady.

"Both," Yui agreed. "Always both. You taught me that."

"I didn’t teach you anything. You worked it out before I did."

"I kept the scrap," Yui said. "I’ve been working things out before you since I was seven."

They talked for another hour and forty minutes. It was the longest call since she had left.

She told him about her supervisor’s office, full of children’s books in eleven languages and a bicycle leaning against the filing cabinet. She told him the supervisor had asked, at the very end, whether the manga boy was real, and Yui had shown her a photograph of the doorframe. The supervisor had looked at the fourteen pencil lines for a long time. Then she had said something in Finnish that Yui didn’t understand, and wouldn’t translate afterward, although she clearly knew exactly what it meant.

She told him about the first winter of fieldwork. It would start next January, nine months away. She would stay with her parents, one wall away, and walk to the tutoring centre in Asagaya every morning, where Tsubasa would still be teaching on Tuesdays and Thursdays, as he had promised.

"Kenji will be twelve," she said. "He’ll pretend he doesn’t care that I’m back. He’ll draw an enormous sea serpent and refuse to let anyone see it."

"He’ll show you on the second day."

"The third," Yui said. "He’s proud."

He told her about the two signatures and Tachibana’s father-in-law’s pen, and Ichinose’s crooked signature. He told her about Minase on a folding chair outside the bicycle shop, saying now the hard part, and two hundred million yen they didn’t have.

Yui was quiet for a moment.

"You’ll find it," she said. "The same way you found everything. One person at a time."

"Tachibana-san said that too. Up the stairs."

"Then it’s true," Yui said. "Two people said it."

After the call, he sat on the crate for a long time.

Across the dark living room, the bedroom door stood open, and the pencil lines on its frame caught the faint light from the street. There were twelve old ones, in his mother’s slanted hand, and two new ones above them.

He got up, took a pencil from the desk, and wrote something small beside Yui’s line, in the narrow space between her mark and his. It wasn’t a height. It was a date.

January.

He sat back down on the crate and looked at it.

His phone buzzed once more before he went to bed. It was Minase, from Mitaka. It was a Sunday night, and she was still at her desk by the window, as she always was.

A music label called on Friday. Not a Japanese one. An independent label in Shanghai.

The founder is a composer. He says he’s been reading Threadless Gate since the #ThreeLines weekend two autumns ago. He says he wrote a card for it that went viral, in English.

He wants to write the theme. For nothing, he says, until we find funding. He says he’s already heard it.

His name is Chen Wei.

Haruki read the name twice.

He remembered the card. It had appeared on a Sunday morning in October of the first year, while he was scanning thumbnails for Eclipse Blade. Hoshino had sent it with a string of exclamation marks and no explanation. It was a #ThreeLines card about Threadless Gate, written in careful English by an account based in Shanghai. Its profile said only musician.

For anyone who has ever heard a song that only they could hear.

The boy with nothing above his head knows something he can’t explain yet.

I think I know what it is. I think some of us have one too.

He had read it three times that morning. He had never replied. He had wondered for a year and a half what the last line meant, and whether he had imagined the faint gold flicker at the edge of his vision when he read it.

Some of us have one too.

He wrote back to Minase slowly.

Did he say anything else?

Her reply took a few minutes.

Only one thing. He asked me to pass it on to you, word for word, and said you’d understand.

"Tell him I’ve been waiting to hear from him since the eclipse boy. I didn’t know how to start. So I started with a song."

Haruki sat on the crate in the dark and didn’t move for a long time.

Only one person had ever called Kael the eclipse boy. It was Ōkubo Shin, once, on a phone call in October of the first year, when Haruki had asked him how to write something loud. It had never been printed or posted anywhere. It had been said aloud once, between two people, and then Haruki had written it on a page of his notebook that nobody had read but him.

In the corner of his vision, very faintly, the system flickered. It was pale gold at the edges, the colour of an eclipse.

[Signal detected. Source: External. Status: Unlocked (partial).]

It was gone before he could read the rest.